Posted
by
timothy
on Thursday June 30, 2011 @02:12PM
from the you-ungrateful-whelps dept.

rtfa-troll writes "Microsoft is preparing its customers for plenty of outage time according to the Register, with a scheme for Office 365 which will give customers some money back. The offer seems to be Microsoft's answer to Google offering a '100% uptime guarantee' (they even pay for maintenance time) The most interesting thing about the scheme is that you can have a one and a half day outage every month (or is that 18 solid days a year?) and still expect to pay half price. I wonder Microsoft have put the Sidekick management in charge of their customer's data. Looking forward my expense forms have getting eaten by the cloud so I have to fill them in again."

It looks like someone did 365 days by about.9505 (still technically over 95% uptime, requiring half payment) and divided that by 12 to get 1.5 days per month.

I guess it's a possible outcome... but clearly someone was looking for the worst possible way to represent the ToS. Maybe that's part of diligent research for your company... but certainly doesn't tell the whole story (like you did).

And yes, when dealing with Microsoft, I do try to work out what is the worst possible interpretation of their contract. It's not sufficient to understand how they will screw me, but it's a start. Anyway, you were pretty close.

I think it's a bit high regardless (1.5 days could easily fall on a weekend that I might need or even want to work), but it's misleading (at best) to suggest it's 18 days of straight offline time.

Even worse, no where in the article does it actually state 1.5 days. Anywhere. I must be new here, but here is the relevant quote from the article:

Under the service level agreement, customers receive 25 per cent off their monthly payment if uptime falls below 99.9 per cent to 99 per cent, half of the sum back if it falls below 99 per cent and a complete refund for anything under 95 per cent.

King said clearly Microsoft would prefer it had no issues but claimed: "the processes in place are robust and financially backed, if you look across cloud providers in the market that is unique."

In other words, it's just like Google's service, only they don't claim 100% uptime, which is unlikely to be realistic (even Gmail has failed on numerous occasions). And, they pay you if it falls below 99.9% uptime. Considering that you still get the benefit of local deployment, as well as the cloud, I'd say that's actually a good deal.

Not one I have any interest in paying for, but it sounds a lot better than Google's unlikely claim.

You quote the part where it states 18 days for the year, or 3/2 days for the month. The authoer left the calculation as an exercise to the reader, but it's pretty clearly spelled out there.

Then of course you must add in your ISP's guaranteed uptime, what you don't have one. Well, what about all those hops between you and yours and your cloud, all those connections that must work for you and yours to work.

The cloud always sounds nice but with all those cheap profit hunger bastards between you and your data, that cloud can often be end up being droughts and floods rather than a steady rain. Sounds better as a backup for internal primary services (use the cloud only in emergencies, concurrent

Well let's say this shitty Windows box boots from a single hard drive and it fails once per week (maybe someone ran scandisk on a drive with large files and the dumb thing filled up the RAM and then went into page file thrashing because that's what scandisk does with large files for some reason, even in Win7!!!).

Let's say it takes 10 minutes to swap the drive and 2 hours to restore it from a backup. That's 2 hours and 10 minutes of downtime per week, or 8 hours and 40 minutes of downtime per month. Still le

Are we talking about a total outage or are we talking about a percentage of users left unable to get their data?

I ask because I imagine it's a huge technical challenge to have constantly editable data synchronized across all the machines in the 'cloud'. (I will be up front and admit that I don't know a lot about how something like this works.)

The only problem you might have is two people trying to edit the same document at once, but you'll have that no matter what technology you're using. The storage on this should work like shared storage on a giant RAID5/6 array so that many servers have no problem accessing the same data and some hardware can go down without causing any trouble.

Well that's great if all the servers are in the same location. But what about cases where you've got some servers in LA and others in NYC, like Amazon and I think Google does, how do they sync up?

I'm sure their are numerous ways to approach this problem. But a lot of it is just having a huge pipe going between your datacenters to connect your environments. Then it is just a matter of having numerous near identical platforms/clusters that you can take in and out of your load balancers at each site.

So say you had servers in two different geographical locations, and in both locations you had at least a few clusters. You keep at least one or two cluster hot(live customer facing) in both sites and sy

the month to month SLA part is entirely comedy though. If they average less than 99% uptime over a year, even if it's one particular bad month, people are going to drop this service instantly at that point. A consumer may be stupid enough to forget month to month, but a business won't.

You discount the money hole syndrome. I a business dig's itself into a hole, you the only way to fill it back up it to pour more money into it.

Seriously though, there are a lot of executives happily looking forward to the day they get to fire that IT guy who keeps making him feel bad. I bet they could call it Office 256 and plenty of businesses would buy it.

I'm fed up while having to double my storage capacity every few years. I'm fed up with having dusty DVDR backups laying around and I'm fed up with burning them. It's time to let someone else worry about it all; I have better things to do.

Crashplan allows you to back up to a local HDD as well as to their data centers, and automatically, all you need is a connection and your computer to be turned on. It's a hell of a lot easier than managing and tracking DVDs.

If you want to keep your data and apps on your own computer, then you are free to do so. If someone else wants to keep their data and apps in the cloud, they have that option too. Or, better yet, pick and choose based upon the situation. After all, both standalone and cloud computing have their benefits and drawbacks.

So-called "cloud" computing has been around for many years in one form or another, but mainly as 'hosted services'. The only difference now is that it's really, really popular (beyond what $9.95/year can do) because it looks like another computer out there on the internet, not some minimalist service. It also costs more, as you'd expect. The only thing that hasn't changed

99.999% uptime was acquirable years ago. How do you think they did that, exactly? Magic? No - the same schemes employed now with cheaper s

Especially this early in the life cycle of this "cloud" crap. Any expectation of not loosing your data if you don't keep a backup yourself is entirely your own fault.

Early? Come again? I've been providing "cloud computing" services for about a decade. Is 10 years early?

Of course, the names have changed. There was "Service Oriented Architecture" and before that it was "Software as a Service" and then before that "managed application hosting" and various other names for it over time. Name doesn't matter, it's

Compare that with the uptime that typically have in any windows installation running the old office, for which you pay the full price, at least, if you access the new online version from a non-ms browser/operating system.

... is that more than 18 days of downtime results in a complete refund, 4 to 18 days of downtime results in a 50% refund, and 8 hours to 4 days of downtime results in a 25% refund. (Calculations are assuming 1 year of service, though I don't know how Microsoft does it.)

This is not what I would call excellent, but it is several orders of magnitude better than the summary suggested.

The point is that the summary is horribly misleading because it is very selective about the information that it provides.

In that respect it is even more misleading than my post since 0.05*365.242199 is closer to 18.2621099 days. You may also wish to note that there are similar rounding errors (though I'd prefer to call them conversational conveniences) in all of the figures that I presented.

Thus my credibility is entirely destroyed and my original post should probably earn a score of "0, flame-bait" becaus

Just because it's accurate doesn't mean it tells the whole story. It's called "spin". Submitter clearly wants Office 365's SLA to look bad, so he focuses on the absolute least impressive number. He's written an opinion piece rather than reporting, thus making himself a pundit instead of a reporter. It's the difference between Brian Williams and Glen Beck.

The fact is you're a liar, and you are going out of your way for some reason to attack one company, while leaving the other in a much better position than it deserves. You hypocritically ignored the fact that you made up Google's 100% uptime. Google doesn't even claim the figure in the article you linked and they offer similar promises.

It's also worth noting--to you especially--that offering a discount due to downtime is not the same as guaranteeing downtime. Financially compensating for that downtime is wh

Come on, guys. It's just a SLA. You get a full refund if it's more than 5% downtime (18.25 days). You get half off for 99% to 95% uptime , and 25% off for 99.9% to 99%. Do you really think they're expecting to give these refunds? No. But it's there in a contract just in case. I doubt many people will even get the 25% refund. 99.9% isn't by any means terrible.

Write an article when it actually goes down. The mindless/. MS bashing needs to stop.

We use Microsoft's current online offering, and we've had both a 25% and a 50% refund in the last year and a half. the refund doesn't even begin to make up for the sales losses and confusion when our dealers can't get their orders through to us.

We use Microsoft's current online offering, and we've had both a 25% and a 50% refund in the last year and a half. the refund doesn't even begin to make up for the sales losses and confusion when our dealers can't get their orders through to us.

It's always a good idea to use the cloud to host crucial business systems with no fallback plans in case there are problems. Heck, the cloud is good for anything! Personally, my "waste processing" system is routed through the cloud. Sure that two week outage last month was a bit uncomfortable, but I had considered the ramifications of this design before implementing it, as I'm sure you guys did.

And why did you go to the cloud if you rneeds (seemingly) can't tolerate any sort of downtime?

I can only assume that rather than continue to put your business at risk you've since hired IT folks and created a complete, redundant datacenter that not only has redundant hardware, network access from diferent providers, and a reliable form of emergency power that can run the datacenter indefinitely so that your application can achieve the four (or more) nines your business obvioulsy demands?

We are using BPOS. Since we are a small group we can't really afford dedicated resources for only email. We wanted to go with gmail, but our new owners insisted on a Microsoft solution.
Other than the outages, the service isn't all that bad. It's just rather hard to have redundant email systems for incoming email. When our dealers don't get a response, they tend to resend orders. this makes it a real mess when things start back up, as we have to figure out which orders are duplicates. that might not

Most of the issues have been random outages and issues with their login program. I've never encountered any of the login issues myself, so it's hard to tell it the problems are Microsoft's or user error. When we do have issues, their tech support is fairly responsive and does not seem to be stuck on a script. All said, it's a pretty good deal, I'm just concerned that the connectivity problems seem to have gone from random issues that occurred for a few of our users for a few minutes, to company wide prob

Still kind of sad show of confidence. Competitor offers 99.9% up-time full guarantee counting maintenance etc... Microsoft counters with a 96% partial refund guarantee. If Microsoft made the first move it would be fairly respectable, but to bring out a counter move that is less then it's target is a tad silly. Something tells me microsoft's marketing department is not getting the idea of how to one up the competition. If you come in first whatever offer you make is considered good, coming in second and offe

Come on, guys. It's just a SLA. You get a full refund if it's more than 5% downtime (18.25 days). You get half off for 99% to 95% uptime , and 25% off for 99.9% to 99%. Do you really think they're expecting to give these refunds? No. But it's there in a contract just in case. I doubt many people will even get the 25% refund. 99.9% isn't by any means terrible.

Write an article when it actually goes down. The mindless/. MS bashing needs to stop.

Apparently they *do* expect to have to pay out on their SLA guarantee, otherwise they would have made it a 100% refund. Or even a 150% guarantee "We're so confident in our service that we will pay *you* half your monthly fee if we're down more than 5% of the time"

99.9% is reasonable for a cloud hosted app, but if they miss that target then they only pay me 25% of my monthly fee which doesn't really offset the cost to me if my entire workforce is idled for an hour because they can't reach their email, docum

If you need three nines ( and that includes not only work hours but evening and weekend hours when your workforce probably wasn't using Live365 anyways), maybe you shouldn't be on a cloud service.

Somehow Google maintains nearly 4 9's of service uptime on Google apps. My internet connection (dual-homed to independent, BGP so I can use either ISP) gave me 99.95% uptime last year (including maintenance windows).

I don't know what kind of workforce you have, but in my company I can count on people working from around 4am (from our East coast office) and ending around 11pm when people sign off for the night - this includes weekends (though obviously there are a lot fewer people working on a Saturday after

I actually thought the assurances were descent. Try looking at the SLA for your other cloud products to compare. Plus I've had Microsoft hosted Exchange for almost 2 years now and can't remember a single outage.

But what's sad is that the title of this 'article' and summary tries so obviously and desperately to frame the SLA in the worse possible light.

Even the typo ridden summary compared it side by side to the guarantee that came before it (google apps). From the above linked article "In 2010, Gmail specifically achieved a 99.984 percent uptime rate both for consumers and professionals who use it as part of Apps, Google said."

Likewise. I've worked for a company using BPOS for the past month and a half now, and I can recall off the top of my head maybe a total of a day and a half of outage across half a dozen or so different outages. "Mail's down" is a common sentiment. When people are working out of their mailboxes (documents, correspondence, and so on) - such as in a 'business office' - that really, really hurts.

That is to say, is your scenario that downtime of the cloud would result in the loss of a multi-million dollar contract in any way shape or form realistic?

I am no fan of "the cloud" in this context. But is there some aspect of Office 365 (or is this now Office 347?) that would prevent people from making offline copies of their work? Wasn't the idea of the ability of making offline copies via Office 365 one of Micrsoft's earlier advantages over Google.

And if it happens on the weekend, what is the "cost" of the 18 hour outage? Very nearly nothing in most cases.

Your imagined/calculated $80K "cost" is cut in half if the outage spills over into the weekend OR spillsover from the weekend into Monday...

Let's not forget the month over month savings from not having an IT infrastructure beyond a couple switches and an internet connection - that has to figure into your savings when weighed against the cost of an outage.

And if it happens on the weekend, what is the "cost" of the 18 hour outage? Very nearly nothing in most cases.

Your imagined/calculated $80K "cost" is cut in half if the outage spills over into the weekend OR spillsover from the weekend into Monday...

Let's not forget the month over month savings from not having an IT infrastructure beyond a couple switches and an internet connection - that has to figure into your savings when weighed against the cost of an outage.

Your imaginary "company" has 100 employees who suddently become incapable of producing anything of value when their Live365 access is cut off? No cached documents, no local installs of Office? There's nothing they can do? Sounds like a company that shouldn't have been on a cloud-based solution, IMHO.

So you're telling me I get all of the cost savings from "not having an IT infrastructure beyond a couple switches and an internet connection", yet my company is stupid because I have no local installs of Office and can't get any work done without Live365?

In 3 years at my current company, we've maintained greater than 99.995% availability for fileservers, (thank you Netapp!), Exchange, and Active Directory. (excluding scheduled maintenance)

My numbers don't have to take into account anything that you mentioned, because I was just pointing out that the SLA guarantee is really meaningless, I wasn't comparing Office365 to locally installed applications.

Without some real world numbers, it's impossible to see how Office365 will affect my users since I don't yet k

Maybe, just maybe, after the first few hours of the outage it would occur to an employee to go to BestBuy and pick up a retail copy of Office and install it on their PCs? Or maybe download the tial software from MS and run that for the duration of the outage?

Nope, I guess when a multi-million dollar contract is on the line, there's no way the employees can "think outside the box"...

That is why I titled the post "Timing". Just as you are about to pull together the two hour presentation the cloud goes down. You now have ten hours to pull it together. Even with off line backups there are several issues.

1. Who has the most recent file?2. How many updates have been lost and need to be re-done.3. How do we get this presentation package together without email?

If everyone has to keep backup copies of every part of a major presentation just in case the cloud goes down then why use the cloud? I

Under the service level agreement, [Office 365] customers receive 25 per cent off their monthly payment if uptime falls below 99.9 per cent to 99 per cent, half of the sum back if it falls below 99 per cent and a complete refund for anything under 95 per cent.

Compare this with the google apps SLA [google.com] and you'll see MSFT's is actually better.

The real expense isn't actually the cost of the service. The real expense is the LOST PRODUCTIVITY. That does not get compensated in form by any vendor. Frankly they could offer it for free for a year and not cover the cost of the lost productivity for a single day for a heavy office application user. 99.9% reliability means 8.76 hours of downtime per year. Someone making $20/hour would cost $175. Add in the fact that they presumably are there because their services are more valuable than their salary (otherwise why hire them?) and you can add on even more cost. Our at breakeven our company brings in revenue of about $100,000 per employee per year which for 240 working days works about to about $416/day. A seat of LibreOffice or even Microsoft Office is cheap compared with lost productivity.

Furthermore no matter how reliable a "cloud" services vendor might be, they can never be more reliable than the internet and power connections of the customer. Getting an uptime guarantee from the ISP is not cheap and you also have to have backup power to ensure computers function when the lights go out. I've had outages where I live of several hours at least 3 times in the past 12 months.

Cloud computing has its advantages but the economic advantages are still pretty unclear for most of us.

So, to take the original poster's comment that 36 hour outage in a month yields a 50% refund on service fees, that seems OK, I mean, it's 95% uptime (365-18)/365 * 100 = 95%. Would I like it if my service went down for 18 hours straight? No, of course not - but what is the suggested compensation for a 36-hour outage? 100% refund for the month despite giving the user 28 1/2 days of uninterrupted service?

What does Google offer for a 36 hour (1 1/2 day) outage? Amazon? I suspect this is actually a generous com

Once someone has a day and a half of downtime they aren't going to care about getting half of their money back. Instead they will want a full refund and damages. I know in some situations, even for smaller businesses, that downtime could easily cost thousands of dollars.
Unfortunately for Microsoft, there may not be a lot of people using their software in the future even if they make it free.

And to top it off, it is reportedly going to cost different prices dependent on where you live. From what I have read Even though the Aussie $ is higher than U.S. $ at the moment, we are going to pay up to 76% more (microsoft-office-365-cost-aust-companies-76%-more [technology...tor.com.au])

I cringed when I read that mangled excuse for a sentence. For fuck's sake people, is it too much to ask to know how to USE the fucking language you speak? I've been noticing this shit more and more lately. Are we just getting lazier or stupider?

The honest truth is that the Slashdot submission form cuts off half way across. So I can only ever read half of the sentence I wrote. So in fact I did do exactly what you said, and treated it as write once / read never. Except that I couldn't even write it in one go. But I had to decide, which was more valuable; my time moving the text in and out of the edit box or yours (and that of a few hundred thousand other Slashdot readers) trying to piece together the text. According to Dogbert's principles and

Google promises 99.99% uptime as what they deliver, but, as clearly stated in the links that were included in the article, they start paying for outage time from the very first minute. It's a commitment to keep working towards 100% uptime and that's a pretty clear difference compared to Microsoft. Maybe you can't read?